tidus you already know too much about faggotry
also learning about hindi is pretty interesting, since english's ties to the common language that hindi also sprang from (Indo-european? I can't remember the name) predate the invasions of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes aka the first real radical changes to the language
Faggotry and fags are two different things.
I hear the voices inside my head. They counsel me. They understand. They talk to me.
Originally Posted by djwolford
The Anglo-Saxon invasion of the British Isles didn't bring any radical changes to (what would become) the English language. It expanded the region in which Germanic languages were spoken to include the British Isles, where a combination of Germanic languages would eventually develop into English, but it didn't bring about any radical change.
At any rate, I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the Anglo-Saxon invasions were the first radical changes to "the language"; if by "the language" you mean some sort of original Indo-European father tongue, then no, Hindi and the Germanic languages are separated by multiple branchings (i.e., radical changes, the appearance of new languages by divergence from a linguistic ancestor) on the Indo-European language tree. Hindi developed from Sanskrit, which is on the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European tree. Germanic languages make up their own, entirely separate, primary branch. In other words, Hindi and the Germanic languages are about as far from each other as two languages can be while still being Indo-European languages.
Last edited by Syme; 01-28-2009 at 07:54 PM.
Well "radical change" is of course a relative term.
The pre-existing group of British languages (i.e. the Celtic branch of IndoEuropean) that were spoken in Britain prior to the influx of Germanic peoples in the first millenia AD were quite different from the newly imported Germanic dialects brought by the invaders - certainly the average Briton would have extreme difficulty comprehending what young Beowulf was trying to communicate to you, other than that his aggressive demeanour and bloody sword probably meant bad news for you and your kin.
As you point out this change was not really radical within the wider context of the IndoEuropean languages, wherein the Celtic languages and Germanic languages are relatively closely related, but it's fair to say that the influx of Germanic languages did result in a radical change (for the inhabitants, certainly) of the locally used languages, with the end result largely Germanic, but incorporating a number of features from the pre-existing British dialects of Celtic (and a goodly smattering of the Romance languages by this stage).
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